


Burnout & Brochures

by Desiree_Harding



Series: Stolen Century (Desiree Style) [4]
Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: But also, Canon Compliant, College/University, Feminist Themes, Gen, How Lucretia got into the IPRE, Lucretia is very smart and extremely frustrated, Oneshot, Pre-Canon, Pre-Episode: e060-066 The Stolen Century Parts 1-7, Pre-IPRE era Lucretia, Rated T for language, definitely no self-projecting involved in this one, no trace of that here
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-08
Updated: 2019-09-08
Packaged: 2020-10-12 18:36:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,833
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20569001
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Desiree_Harding/pseuds/Desiree_Harding
Summary: It’s days like this Lucretia wishes she wasn’t even at the University at all, which is ridiculous. How many people would kill to have her spot here? How many applications were rejected in favor of hers? The planet’s best Liberal Arts University doesn’t just take anyone. They don’t give just anyone free room and board. They don’t always take eighteen year-olds even. There are people all around the world who would give anything to be where Lucretia is right now.As if that matters.





	Burnout & Brochures

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this in an hour and a fit of passion. No it is not a self-insert why do you ask?  
Enjoy!

Lucretia is, in a word, _miserable_.

She shouldn’t be, really. The suns are shining, the day is warm. The University’s quads are filled with students lounging on the grass: reading, talking, playing music. Someone’s even brought a _dog_, and is tossing a stick for it to chase with glee.

And it’s days like this Lucretia wishes she wasn’t even _at_ the University at all, which is ridiculous. How many people would _kill_ to have her spot here? How many applications were rejected in favor of hers? The planet’s best Liberal Arts University doesn’t just take _anyone_. They don’t give just anyone free room and board. They don’t always take eighteen year-olds even. There are people all around the _world_ who would give _anything_ to be where Lucretia is right now.

As if that _matters_.

As if they would have any idea what they were getting into. Lucretia certainly didn’t. The University was a shining beacon, worlds away and so close, a place where she could put her talents to _use_. A place to _learn_. A place where people would perceive her talent, where she could _make_ something of herself. Everyone had believed it. The University advertised that way. Knowledge, the pinnacle of all things, unattainable and mysterious but attainable _here_. A place where minds like hers would find kindred spirits and be respected.

And Lucretia, so _stupidly_, had _believed_ it.

_Stupid_, she chastises herself, storming through a green, not paying any mind to the picnic blankets she steps on. But that’s just the issue isn’t it. She’s _not_ stupid.

She’s entirely too fucking smart, and that’s just the problem, isn’t it?

It sticks in her head as she storms through the door to her dormitory, as she climbs the stairs to her fourth-floor room, her little room, as she jams the key in the lock and slumps against the door, falling back into it and making it shut with a _thud_ that sounds just enough like a slam to alleviate 3% of her tension.

It’s not enough.

She runs her hands through her hair, grips it at the roots and _pulls_, furrowing her brow and closing her eyes and trying to take deep breaths.

It’s just that she could _scream_.

Four days. Four straight days of classes that have left her ready to _explode_. Four straight days of lectures, and seminars that she takes notes for with both hands, the right notebook filled with content, the left a detailed analysis of every shift of energy in the room, every time the stupid _fucking _professor interrupts one of her classmates and Lucretia sees her shrink back in her chair, every time her comments, _her thoughts_ get attributed to a boy with _fake glasses _and oily hair. Four straight days of everything she’s said being said _again_, in slightly different words. Four straight days of hearing “what Lucretia was trying to say…” soft, condescending tones and having to hold back a scream as visceral and powerful as the bang at the start of the universe.

She untangles her hands from her hair. Opens her eyes. Takes off her glasses. She can’t handle having to see right now. It’s too much. It’s all too much.

It occurs to her that she’s thirsty.

The problem with it all, she thinks, as she pours a glass of water, starts the kettle for tea, is that she’s too _smart_. She can’t help but see it when it happens, the little things, none of them egregious enough to be fought over, but the combination of them laying on her like a weight, every day, every hour, pressing her and crushing her to _death_.

She wonders, momentarily, if she’ll ever get out of this place.

_Don’t be ridiculous_, she chastises herself, sipping her water, her eyes far away. It’s only one more year. She can make it.

But she’s been here for three weeks and she feels like she’s going to snap at any moment, feels tense like a tightly coiled spring, can feel the energy bubbling under the surface, nowhere to go, nowhere to go, bubbling and bubbling until it bubbles right up into her lungs and throat and chokes her out.

That’s almost good, actually. She should write that down.

She should’ve known, she thinks, as she inscribes the words to paper. She should’ve known that a simple _institution_ wouldn’t change what she’s always known. She should’ve known that the world doesn’t simply change because you’re inside a more expensive set of walls, because people are almost required to _think_ for fourteen hours a week. She should have known as soon as she started ghost writing at age thirteen, not because she wanted to, but because she couldn’t get published, couldn’t _sell_ under her own name.

Three of the top ten best-selling biographies of the last five years are hers. And she has to repeat everything three times in her Tuesday seminar, because it’s the only way to get herself heard.

The kettle is whistling. Lucretia removes it from the heat.

There’s almost a damage that comes with it. She’s so tired. So terribly, terribly bone-tired, and not because she doesn’t sleep. Not because she stays up late into the night, transcribing facts from the lives of the “great men” of the modern day. No, it’s the pent-up energy that sticks with her day to day, hour to hour, minute to minute, the continuous frustration, the inability to escape it. The way she always thinks that maybe, just maybe, if she continues on the path she’s on now, if she picks and chooses right, it won’t ever happen again.

And then the fact that it always _does_.

The fact that she has to refer to it as _it_ in her head, that even the _word_ is so dirty to her, opens so many doors that she’s afraid of opening, that she can’t even acknowledge it for what it is.

The utter _hopelessness _of it all is what gets to her. The fact that there’s nowhere to turn. That she’s not even sure if she _should_ be upset about it, that she feels crazy, that she’s tying herself up in knots over what might be a _human _behavior, and what if it’s not… what if it’s _nothing_, and it’s all in her head. What if the way her professors act is indiscriminate, and Lucretia only notices a difference because she’s fabricating it for the sake of making herself feel _special_.

The tea water isn’t hot anymore, so distracted she’s been. Lucretia sighs and sets the kettle back down. She flops onto her bed, buries her face in the pillows. Resists, again, the urge to scream, because she hates the way her throat feels when she’s done.

She wishes, deeply, fervently, that she really _was_ stupid. Or naïve. Or just ignorant, even being _ignorant_, though not perfect, might do. Or more ignorant than she is now.

That last thought sparks a tiny little rage in her. That she can’t even _manage_ true arrogance, so beaten down is she by this fucking… this _way _people treat her. That even on her own, unobserved, she feels the need to temper her knowledge of herself with humility. That she can’t even indulge in a little vindictive self-importance. That she has to make excuses, has to cover her ass, even here, in her own head, where there’s no one to tell her she’s wrong.

She feels her throat tighten up and _gods _how she wants to cry. How long has it been since she did? She can’t remember. She feels vaguely, that she’s been on the verge of it for days, weeks, months, years.

_Hundreds _of people would give an _arm and a leg_ to be where she is now.

And she’s miserable.

She turns over on her bed, lets the sunlight gently diffused in her window pane and some concentrated deep breathing lull her into something almost resembling relaxation. She closes her eyes and doesn’t sleep. She tries to meditate, like she learned two years ago in that one seminar about stress relief, but she doesn’t remember how. She’d been so tired on the day that the moment she closed her eyes she fell asleep, dead to the instructor’s guidance.

A sigh pushes its way out of her lungs, and she blinks away the tears pricking at the back of her eyes.

She turns her head.

A flash of red in her periphery catches her attention.

Her brain works sluggishly after episodes like these (if it can ever be said that Lucretia’s brain is _sluggish _in any capacity) but still, it only takes her a few seconds to identify the flyer from the IPRE.

She doesn’t _want _to get out of bed. Her bag is close. She hangs off the side like an oozing slime, and her fingertips can just pluck the flyer from the bag.

(She almost falls out of bed trying to pull herself back up).

But the IPRE is planning an _Exploration_ mission. She remembers her department head mentioning it in the hall, remembers the look he gave her when she snagged the flyer. It’s not like there’s anything about it up Lucretia’s alley, but she’s a curious woman. Some light reading to take her mind off things might be good.

The plans for the ship are ambitious. Lucretia didn’t know that the capability to hop to other planes even _existed_. There’s not much of that at the University; there’s a reason why the IPRE is its own Institution. But still. It’s interesting. The flyer looks to be a recruitment notice, which half seems strange to her, because she would think that the Institute would pull from its own ranks, but she skims the positions anyway. Arcanists, mostly, which feels typical. Something about a cleric, an interesting choice, a bodyguard, a chronicler, a –

A _chronicler_.

Lucretia sits up in bed, ram-rod straight, as her eyes flick over the entry for a _chronicler _again, and a third time, and a fourth –

The flyer ends up crushed in her hand.

A chronicler. The IPRE needs a chronicler. For a mission to the farthest reaches of the galaxy, and then beyond that. To the far reaches of the _planar system_.

A chronicler. The only one on the ship. _One _position offered. On a groundbreaking mission. One chronicler out of a crew of planar scientists, spacy types (_literally_) who might know the ins and outs of the fabric of the universe, but who probably know fuck-all about _chronicling_.

And Lucretia’s too smart for her own good, and ambidextrous, and _three of the top ten best-selling biographies of the last five years are hers._

Briefly, one little corner of her brain wonders what the girl who sits across from her in her Tuesday seminar is going to do when Lucretia’s gone, and she has no one to level her exasperated looks at the professor explains what she was “trying to say,” and gets it _wrong_.

The rest of her brain is already drafting her application essay.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for the read! Leave a like and a comment if you enjoyed it and check out my other works for more introspection ;) Have a good one!


End file.
